Suchergebnisse

Introduction -- Industry and estates on Tyneside -- Development of estate accounting in England -- Estates as productive/non-productive investments -- Accounting as an effective/ineffective aid to management -- Estate organization and reporting needs -- Role of the proprietor -- Integration -- Technical characteristics -- White-Ridleys -- Cotesworths -- Accounting knowledge base -- Colliery viewers -- Contractual arrangements -- Organizational link -- Leasing -- Subcontracting -- Direct mining -- Partnerships -- Legal underpinning -- Internal audit -- White-Ridleys -- Cotesworths -- Concluding remarks -- Return on investment -- Cost control -- Historical profit statements -- Planning schedules -- White-Ridleys -- Cotesworths -- Concluding remarks -- Labour process/labour control -- Labour control -- Labour productivity -- Labour supply -- Theoretical explanations -- Marx -- Foucault -- Concluding remarks -- Behavioural aspects -- White-Ridleys -- Cotesworths -- Concluding remarks -- Conclusion

ABSTRACT
The paper analyzes the decision of the FASB and IASB not to treat the motivational and control aspects of stewardship as a separate and distinct reporting objective to that of facilitating investment decisions. It does so first by considering the demand for information to control agents, and second by assessing the capacity of decision-useful information to replicate stewardship effects. The paper finds an essence to accounting based on the legal protection of property rights, encompassing stewardship, which has remained constant since earliest times. The decision taken by the boards on stewardship also appears disconnected from changes in the capital markets, as well as the writings on reporting objectives that preceded it.

In a recent Accounting History article, Sy and Tinker (S&T) [2005] critique accounting history for its support of "archivalism" and empiricism in light of irrefutable arguments against these "antiquarian epistemes." While tempted to lambaste S&T's article as unfettered social activism rather than evidence-based historical inquiry, we focus instead on the more substantive questions S&T raise. We initially summarize their essential arguments, although some of the statements they make are contradictory in nature. We then discuss fundamental issues and genuine challenges to accounting history posed by the post-Kuhnian critique that S&T and others represent, as well as the nature and purpose of historical enquiry. We reviewed the accounting history journal articles published between 2001 and 2005 and use our findings to evaluate the broad assertions that S&T make about accounting history. We conclude that S&T's critique is unwarranted and unjust, especially when the subject matter of the most recent accounting history articles is considered.

The archives of the General Mining Association (GMA), a London-based enterprise with substantial holdings in the Nova Scotian coal-mining industry during the 19th century, are investigated in this paper. The historical record was examined with particular reference to the degree to which industrial costing techniques were transplanted via engineers/managers within the British Empire. The findings support the hypothesis that linkages to Newcastle were evident in Canadian coal mining, but that the accounting emphases differed somewhat between the two locales. In Nova Scotia, there was a great attention to day-to-day expense control. A similar concern was apparent also in the North-East of England, but here there appeared the additional sophistications of costing capital improvement projects and estimating the profitability of new workings. With regard to labor, the managers of the GMA's Canadian operations, like their counterparts in the North-East Coalfield, seemed disinterested in tracking the efficiency and productivity of individual miners. We hypothesize that this inattention typified an environment wherein labor was scarce and employment alternatives existed for the work force.

The transition from slavery to freedom in the post-Civil War American South featured the efforts of the Freedmen's Bureau (FB) to help ex-slaves overcome an extremely hostile, racist environment that included the need to articulate new labor relations structures given the demise of the plantation system, to overcome the limitations on equality legislated by the infamous Black Codes, to address the pressing need to educate masses of highly illiterate black children, and the need to provide protection for freedmen from unscrupulous landowners. This paper seeks to measure the degree to which accounting and those performing accounting functions for the FB were able to ameliorate these dire conditions that have caused Reconstruction to be perceived as one of the most negative epochs in the history of American democracy.